Dr. Jenny Shaw Wins William & Mary Quarterly’s Lester J. Cappon Award

Image of the cover page for the William & Mary QuarterlyAssociate Professor Jenny Shaw has been named the winner of the 2020 Lester J. Cappon Award, which is given annually to the author of the best article published in the William & Mary Quarterly.

Shaw’s award was in recognition of her April 2020 WMQ article, “‘In the Name of the Mother’: The Story of Susannah Mingo, A Woman of Color in the Early English Atlantic.” The article explores the life and times of an enslaved laborer on the island of Barbados who bore children by her enslaver and lived the remainder of her life in a sort of de facto freedom in England.

Shaw’s study “challenges scholarly assumptions about enslaved women’s sexual coercion, the role of planter patriarchy in the English world, and early modern metropolitan life. In so doing, Mingo’s experience reveals the many ways that she both embodied and transcended norms regulating racial identity, labor, reproduction, and even enslavement itself.”